MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 729 



of the parent range, until the general idea of one big plateau has been lost, 

 and the country now looks as if these numerous islands of the plain bad been 

 deposited independently on its surface. It is difficult to imagine anything 

 more forbidding than these tablelands. Most of them are entirely covered 

 with coarse black shingle and boulders, rounded and weather-beaten, and 

 looking like the shingle of a rock-bound coast which the sea has 

 forsaken and left exposed, to scorch and blacken in the rays of the pitiless 

 sun. As may be imagined, they offer little attraction either to man or beast 

 and, as a rule, caravans make long detours through the sandy ravines which 

 separate the plateaux sooner than attempt to negotiate them, It is only 

 in the case of some of the larger ones, on which perhaps the occasional 

 sparse sprinkling of shingle has rendered a serpentine camel path possible, 

 that caravans are sometimes taken over them in preference to making a long 

 detour to get round. 



It will be readily believed that there can be little vegetation on these arid 

 and waterless tracts, but here and there a tuft of coarse grass struggling for 

 existence through a crevice in the shingle, or a few flimsy bushes do make 

 a feeble attempt to relieve the black monotony of the picture. 



It was while our caravan was wending its way from day to day through 

 the broad gullies that separate these rock-crested plateaux, that I essayed to 

 explore the surface of some of them. I had with me, carrying a spare rifle, 

 a man named Abdillahi, of much experience in the roll of Shikuris, he having 

 been on several sporting expeditions with Lord Delamere, whose fortunes 

 he is no dcubt sharing at the present moment in the neighbourhood of Lake 

 Rudolph and the Upper Nile. Abdillahi had at all events heard of the Baira, 

 and, if I remember right, had once met with it. After drawing two or three of 

 these plateaux blank during a couple of days 1 march, Abdillahi and I had 

 on the morning in question arrived at the top of a small plateau after a hard 

 and hot climb up its rugged side. This plateau was about § mile long, and 

 at the place where we topped it, some 300 yards broad. After scanning the 

 surface carefully with, the glasses and seeing no living thing, we stumbled 

 across the rough hot shingle to the further edge of the crest, and there, about 

 300 yards to our right front, in a rucky ravine running down the slope from 

 an indentation in the crest was a herd of five animals grazing on the tufts 

 of grass and scrub jungle which sprang up among the boulders. In the dis- 

 tance, half concealed as most of them were by intervening rocks or shrubs, 

 they looked to me like Deroo {Gazella pelzelni), which were plentiful in the 

 plains below ; but it seemed to me to be an extraordinary place to find Deroo 

 grazing in, and after a moment's thought, Abdillahi and I both ejaculated 

 " Deroo nahin haiD," and the latter followed his remark with another " Baira 

 hain, Saheb, Baira hain." I was sceptical for a moment, for having read of 

 the Baira as being a Klipspringer, this was hardly the animal I expected to 

 see, but a careful application of the field-classes satisfied me that they were 



